Being Together
The weekend of 24-25, I had been planning on being in Minneapolis for a few weeks. I am a big fan of the Minnesota Twins baseball team, and they were holding their annual TwinsFest, an offseason celebration of baseball (cold, cold offseason, especially in Minnesota). I drove up to Minneapolis on Friday night for the event, which would be Saturday.
In anticipation of this trip and watching on the news as the violent actions of federal immigration agents enveloped Minneapolis and all of Minnesota, much as we experienced here in Chicagoland last fall, I reached out to some POC supporters and volunteers. We have many wonderful people who make whistle kits for us.
We have them available for clients at each of our sites and distribute them throughout the community. Each kit simply contains a whistle on a string, a small document explaining how to use it, and the ICIRR Family Support Network hotline (855-435-7693). We distribute these kits in English and Spanish, and many wonderful people have held parties to assemble them.
Anyway, in anticipation of this trip to Minnesota, I reached out to some of those volunteers and provid
ed them with the pdf of the instruction sheet with Minnesota’s version of the FSN, in English, Spanish, and Somali. And boy did the people come through!
I packed my vehicle with over 1,000 whistle kits in those three languages (I didn’t bother to count) and headed out on my trip, having made contact with an organization similar to POC to share them with. As you know, Alex Pretti was killed by those agents on Saturday morning. So all the baseball fun was cancelled. But I still had my whistle kits. So on my way out of town Sunday morning, I stopped by a man’s house to drop them off. It was less than ½ mile from the site of Alex Pretti’s death. My new friend had a message I want to share.
He said, "Thank the people of Chicago. We learned best practices from them. We learned how to use whistles to protect our neighbors from them. And, it’s good to know we’re not alone even now."
I do not know where this is all headed. I do not know where our country is headed. But I know we’re not alone. POC is not alone. Our immigrant neighbors are not alone. Minnesota is not alone. Chicagoland is not alone. And for today, that’s enough.
I got a text message from my new Minnesota friend later that day. It simply said “Thank you. The whistles are out in the wild already, protecting our community.”
